'Grey's Anatomy' recap: Three's A Crowd

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"Grey's Anatomy" was really an exercise in balancing the depressing with the absurd, so let's get the depressing out of the way first.

Derek starts his clinical trial and as promised, he doesn't let Meredith assist since he thinks it will make things too personal. Even though she knew this would be the case, she's miffed, all the more so when she finds out Alex won the job instead. The boys quickly realize, however, that this isn't just a matter of compiling data for research; Alzheimer's tends to rip families apart, and they're going to have a hard time not getting emotional during this study. Case in point: Rose from "Lost" is the wife of one of the patients who, when he's lucid, loves her dearly as he has for 40 years, but at other times he doesn't recognize her and instead is in love with another patient he met at his nursing home. Meredith happens to be walking by the room as he's yelling for the other woman, and because she's way better at dealing with these situations than Alex she manages to diffuse things somewhat. At the end of the day Alex tells Derek he's decided to leave the trial and advises him to pick Meredith to assist and forget all of his excuses that he can't work with his wife on something this personal. Derek realizes he's right, so Meredith gets the job from here on out.

It turns out to be a pretty good day for her all around because she also realizes that Cristina is not just back, she's
back. Cristina and Jackson spend the day competing to assist Teddy on a bypass surgery, and their one-upping and arguing gets more and more heated until Jackson swings below the belt and points that Cristina hasn't gotten a lot of practice these past couple of months, has she? Cristina runs off, so a freaked-out Jackson finds Meredith to console her. Once the girls are alone, though, Cristina reveals that she's completely fine but knows this will totally win her the job. Meredith is slightly appalled but mostly delighted to see that Cristina seems totally back to her old self, underhanded tricks and all.

Bailey has become a Twitter fanatic, and she's been live-tweeting surgeries to the delight of Lexie, April, the other assembled residents, and apparently doctors all over the world. When Richard finds out, he of course hits the roof though he obviously has no real idea of what this "Tweetter" entails, and there's a lot of comic relief in the form of him trying to use the correct lingo and failing spectacularly. When he realizes she's tweeting against his specific order to stop, he runs into the OR to yell at her but his lecture is put on hold when something goes wrong. Lexie surreptitiously keeps tweeting as he and Bailey work; when Richard realizes it he hollers at her to stop but of course she's just gotten a suggestion from another doctor as to how they can fix whatever complication is happening in this poor patient's innards. Another hospital nearby tweets that they have what Bailey needs to successfully complete the surgery, so she takes off for a short helicopter ride to go pick it up. This conveniently leaves the others all with nothing to do in the OR, so Lexie finally starts asking Richard some questions coming in from other docs. His desire to teach (and, let's be honest, to show off his surgical brilliance) finally overcomes his distrust of this newfangled technology and he of course winds up getting really into it. After the surgery he even starts combing all of Ellis' old journals to find more information for Bailey to tweet. It remains to be seen if he'll go so far as to figure out how to work the mystifying Twitter himself one of these days.

Arizona is having a hard time with the fact that Callie slept with Mark while they were broken up, but assures Callie that she wants to be involved with having the baby. Mark also assures Callie that he wants to be the dad and not just the "cool uncle," though he realizes this could royally screw things up with Lexie and spends most of the episode putting off telling her about the sticky little situation. In the meantime, Callie goes for her first doctor's appointment (with both Mark and Arizona there for support) but once it's over and the two of them leave, she freaks out that something might be wrong with the baby.

Her doctor isn't terribly amused at first since she's being bombarded by suggestions from all three doctors about how to do her job, but then she finally seems to come around when she sees Callie sobbing to Mark about how she doesn't want to screw up the kid. She brings in some extra-fancy machine that enables them all to hear the heartbeat even though Callie is only a few weeks along, and all three of them are over the moon. That night, Mark finally works up the courage to tell Lexie, who is not nearly as pleased with the news as the rest of them are, and she storms out after asking how he could do this to her a second time now. Seriously, it's some pretty spectacularly bad timing that when things start to go really well between these two, some Sloan offspring appears out of the blue to crash the party.